so the childish parts of us, our passions, our fancies, all our mere animal faculties, can thrust our tongues into such disorders as our reason cannot easily rectify. And alas we too much find the effect of this, its easy frame: it often goes without giving us warning. Tis in its frame the most ready for motion of any member, needs not so much as the flexure of a joint, and by access of humors acquires a glibness too, the more to facilitate its moving. Nature seems to have given it some unhappy advantage towards that. "The tongue is so slippery that it easily deceives a drowsy or heedless guard. And by sober recollection of the ends for which speech was given us and the account we must one day give of our use of it, we had better impress upon ourselves the baseness and the danger of misemploying our tongue in this use of speech." - Richard Allestree But the greater the difficulties are, the more it ought to awaken our diligence, for if we are loose and careless, odds are that we will be carried away with the rest. And for this very reason, all sobriety and strict virtue now lies under heavy prejudice, and no part of that virtue is more prejudiced than that of the tongue, which current and common custom has now enfranchised from all the bonds that moralists and preachers of the Gospel had laid upon it. We see this influence in every trivial secular instance in our every habit. And it is a strange insinuative power that example and custom have over us. "Faults of the tongue are the harder to avoid because they are exemplified to us every day in common practice, and some of them are even recommended as reputable and ingenious. We be converted, we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' Thus, if we go on in the future in our froward discontent, that discontent will associate us with those with whom is 'Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.'" - Richard Allestree Heaven will indeed perfect and crown those graces which were inchoate and begun in us here, but no person's conversion will follow upon his or her entering into heaven for Christ expressly told us that, 'except For we are not to think that heaven will suddenly metamorphose us, and turn our exclamations and wild clamors against the will of God towards us in particular into lauds and magnificats of the same. "It is the peculiar insolence of those degenerate Christians who surely cannot be thought to be in earnest when they speak of singing Hallelujahs to God in the next world, while they entertain him here only with the sullen noise of murmuring and repining. "It is very observable that God, who 'made of one blood all nations of the earth,' Acts 17:26, has so equally distributed all the most valuable privileges of human nature, himself designing to preclude all insulting of one man over another." - Richard Allestree Updated and Modernized from the 1675 Oxford Edition with Annotations added by H&F Books, 2021 Pre-Print Edition Allestree is the author of the "Whole Duty of Man." He was a soldier in the king's army prior to becoming a clergyman and a Royalist, who even carried despatches between Charles II of England and sympathisers. Richard Allestree was an English churchman, chaplain to the King of England, Regius Professor of Divinity, and provost of Eton College in 1665. "O what a deceiver is the devil, that can thus lead on souls to their own damnation! O what a cheat is this transitory world, that can make men so forget that world where they must live for ever! O what an enemy is this flesh, that thus draweth down men's souls from God! O what a besotting thing is sin, that turneth a reasonable soul into worse than a beast! What a bedlam is this wicked world, when thousands are so busy labouring to undo themselves and others, and gratifying the devil against their God and Saviour, who would give them everlasting blessed life!" ~ from the English Edition. Richard Baxter (1615-1691), 1860 Edition of "An Alarm to the Unconverted Sinners" in Gaelic. "Will you still be cheated by this deceitful world, and spend all your days in pampering your guts, and providing for the flesh, that must be rotting shortly in a grave? Were you made for no better use than this? May not we bring you to some sober thoughts of your condition? Not one hour seriously to think whither you are going? What! not one awakened look into the world where you must be for ever?"Įarail Dhurachdach do Pheacaich Neo-Iompaichte Richard Baxter (1615-1691) entitled "To the Unconverted Reader," 1818 Edition. Alleine authored a number of excellent books and sermons. Joseph Alleine was an English Puritan Divine and Nonconformist Pastor who was imprisoned twice for his continued preaching after the Uniformity Act of 1662.
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